|
Getting the most out of your 56K modem connection
By Greg Shultz, The Windows Wizard
If you live in an area of the country where neither DSL nor cable modems are available, you're still relying on your trusty 56K modem to connect to the Net. While 56K modems are a lot faster than their 33.6K predecessors, they really don't allow you to connect at 56K. That's because FCC regulations limit the 56K modems to a maximum connection speed of 53 Kbps. Unfortunately, the story gets worse when you add the fact that a speed of 53 Kbps is only possible if there is just one analog phone switch between your modem and the local phone company's office. If your connection goes through more than one analog switch, which is very likely, your modem's connection speed drops. This means that most people using a 56K modem typically get a connection speed of somewhere between 45 Kbps and 50 Kbps. As you can see, there is little that you can do to boost the connection speed between your modem and your ISP beyond what you're already getting.
Increasing your bandwidth with MultiLink
By Greg Shultz, The Windows Wizard,
When it comes to surfing the Web, speed is everything. With more and more Webs sites moving beyond the static HTML pages of the early years of the Web and offering streaming multimedia, it's becoming essential that you have a high bandwidth connection. As such, many folks are moving away from their 56K modems and enlisting the aid of more powerful connection technologies, such as DSL (Digital Subscriber Lines) or cable modems which offer a dramatic increase in connection speeds when compared to a 56K modem.
Clock Your Connection Speed
By Mark Sweeney, PC Magazine
Clock Your Connection Speed Find out how fast your Internet connection really is. By Mark Sweeney
How fast is your Internet connection, really? Providers of the various types of connections promise different communication speeds, but are you actually getting what you've been promised? Depending on network traffic, actual speeds can be slower. Cable modems are fast-as long as not too many of your neighbors are sharing the line-but can slow considerably with a heavy load. How do you know if you should switch to DSL? This issue's utility, NetPerSec, lets you check your connection speed in real time. NetPerSec monitors all TCP/IP activity to and from the Internet or other networks, and graphs the communication speed. The utility's dynamic tray icon can show send and receive activity with a bar graph or a histogram. For a detailed report, you can open the program's main window to view current and average send and receive speeds in a configurable, graphical display. You can adjust the sampling rate and the amount of data used to compute the average.
Modem installation bug in Windows 2000
By Eric J. Bowden,
Installing and configuring computer devices has come a long way since the first PC's graced our desktops. And while the promise of Windows' plug-and-play has, for the most part, greatly simplified our lives, there is still one computer peripheral that always seems to throw plug-and-play a curve ball--a modem. With all the advancements made to simplify computer configuration, battling with modems seems to be an inevitable chore. Despite the good intentions of developers, there is a disconnect (pardon the pun) between the nirvana promised by plug-and-play and real life experience. However, even with this disconnect, there are some things that you can do.
